10 years ago, having a 20 megabit internet connection was pretty darn solid, but these
days it seems like 200 megabits, or 10 times faster, is on the low end of what many ISPs
offer. And there's no sign of stopping. So considering how quickly both speeds and demand have risen lately, how fast could our
internet be in just a few years time?
Let's ponder our orbs, shall we? Oh my.
So have you heard of Moore's Law, that famous observation that CPUs would have twice as
many transistors every two years? There's actually a similar law called Nielsen's Law that says top-end home internet speeds
get 50% faster each year. And this trend has held up very well since the internet first started gaining popularity.
Better than Moore's Law, in fact. Interestingly, ISPs even use Nielsen's Law to project what speed tiers they should aim
to offer customers in the future. And right now, it looks like 5 gigabit could be the next big thing.
But hold on a second, there are plenty of 10 gigabit devices out there right now.
You can go out and buy network switches and cables that support 10 gigabit Ethernet, and
the newest standards for sending data through a cable modem also support 10 gig.
So why are we talking about speeds leveling off at only 5 gigs?
While there are a very small number of ISPs that do offer 10 gigabit internet, most of
them don't have anything near that fast, for a couple of reasons.
One is that they don't want the underlying tech to get overloaded, so they try to make
sure capacity is double the top customer tier.
So if the infrastructure actually supports 10 gig, a major ISP might only offer 5 gig
as its high-end option. So the other big reason speeds may level off at 5 gigabits in the near future is simply
demand. You see, the average connection these days is somewhere around 200 megabits, and even
if you're trying to stream multiple 4K videos, those only take around 25 megs per stream.
So the average 200 megabit plan seems to be more than enough for many customers, limiting
the number of paying customers screaming for a multi-gig connection.
And when people do experience slowdowns on a 200 meg connection, it's very often a result
of, say, putting their wireless router in a silly location, rather than the pipe not
being fat enough. Even though it's hard to think of a pipe that's too fat.
But what about upload speeds, which are still on average less than 20 megabits a second
for a home connection in the US? With smartphones that record 4K video, increasing numbers of people that work from home, and
3 IoT devices for every person on Earth by 2025, there's definitely demand for a larger
upstream pipe. So we might see this before we see super-goddy download speeds.
I'd still expect to see 5 gigabit download speeds being offered sometime around 2024
if Nielsen's law holds up, especially as multiple 4K HDR streams, large game downloads,
and video chats are becoming more common and eat through bandwidth quickly.
Major ISPs, such as Comcast and Spectrum in the United States, have already successfully
tested speeds at or near 10 gigabit, and it can all be done over existing cabling using
a hybrid approach, where fiber carries internet traffic to a node, at which point plain old
coaxial cable takes over and carries that data to your house at high speed.
But how can we go even faster in the future if most equipment currently has a 10 gig maximum?
Well, there's a new standard called 802.3CA for higher speed fiber.
The idea is to use multiple wavelengths of light, each one carrying 25 gigabits per second.
You could combine, say, four of them for a 100 gigabit link, and then sort them out with
passive splitters to provide home internet connections of 25 or 50 gigabits each.
That's still a little ways off, but for those of you who want to watch TechWiki in 16K,
I'm sure it can arrive soon enough. Can you imagine?
You can see my pores. Hey, thanks for watching this video, guys.
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